Let’s Open Up on Vaginismus

Pragya Ranjan *

Corresponding Author: Pragya Ranjan, Counselling Psychologists & NLP practitioner, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.

Copy Right: © 2022 Pragya Ranjan, This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received Date: November 17, 2022

Published Date: December 01, 2022

Vaginismus

Talking about vaginismus. Vaginismus is the reaction of body to the fear of some or all type of vaginal penetration. It is the symptom in which your vaginal muscles tighten up on their own and you have no control over it. There is no actual known cause of vaginismus. It’s usually linked to anxiety or fear of having sex. One can even get vaginismus even if they had previously enjoyed painless sex. While as some women can have vaginismus in all situation with any object like having sex, inserting tampon, or going physical examination.

Counselling and Vaginismus     

Although vaginismus is very common condition, that can have a huge impact on women, their partner and relationship. Yet women rarely talked about it. Psychosexual therapy for vaginismus aims to understand the cause of condition and to break this cycle. Women dealing with this condition develop the fear and guilt of not being able to make relationship. having gone through some cases in my experience till know, I had seen in some cases its very difficult to change their mindset. In some cases, vaginismus had even led to depression as it had affected their relationship to much and they feel that they had no solution or no one to help them out. The condition are even worse as the women are not able to conceive.

If woman is in relationship an important aspect of the counselling is to attend to the impact of the condition on the relationship for both partners. If women is not in relationship therapy is still very effective at helping the individual to overcome. This may involve educating the women and her partner by providing them with information about the body and the condition. Counselling can help individual or couple to explore any feeling of tension, fear, and anxiety, and how they are linked to thought patterns which affect the behaviour of both partner by providing cognitive therapy (CBT). Exercises are often set for women to complete alone or with partner between the counselling session like doing Kegel, pushups, lunges and use of dilators or gently massaging the vaginal area so that the muscles can get relax. Using dilators can be very useful as helps to very gradually starts inserting objects into vagina, allowing it to stretch sufficiently to eventually be able to accommodate a penis for example. Its very important for a woman to understand that they are not alone suffering from these types of condition and neither they are suffering from any diseases. Many people with vaginismus no longer experience the problem after treatment. But successful treatment take time and you need to be patient.